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Shirt Tales by: Tone Fashion, for Social/General  My
hope is that the revolution will be televised. You see, if it
is then I won’t have to deal with adjusting the vertical
hold of my pupils every time I step foot outside the house. Don’t
play the surprise role like you do when you finally bump into
your “semi-significant” others friends who’ve
been eyeing your every move at the club, I’m not in the
mood. You know exactly what I’m talking about… those
shirts. Those “Button-up” shirts, as they’re
now called. Summer ’03, I seen it through Ghost Face’s Zenith. The moment the world stood still, jersey companies cut orders by a third and urban designers retooled like Tim Allen; “And I don’t wear jersey’s I’m 30 – plus, gimme a crisp pair of jean and a BUTTON-UP.” I instantaneously caught one of those crucial quick chills because I knew there was change on the horizon. How quickly that horizon manifested into illuminati for the fashion handicap is what dumbfounded me. Real quick, Jay frightens me sometimes, seriously. I honestly think if the guy threw on the Gordon Gartrail shirt Denise made for Theo, people would John Hancock it without hesitation. They’d just tuck it into their socks, pop bottles and ball till they fell… over their shirt tales. Anyway, it seems like within a month these shirts were sprouting like weeds, literally. I won’t lie, I skimmed through the Tommy Hilfiger site a couple times, mulling over whether I wanted to drop a buck-twenty for a not yet trendy shirt before realizing I’d rather cut myself. See that’s the funny thing about being fashion conscious, you have to not only have the sense, but also the sixth sense. Anticipation is crucial, just look at Jay. Everybody knows earlier that summer he wore jerseys (don’t they?) and he didn’t just turn 30 a month later, but he felt the jersey thing morphing into a parody of itself. For the Jays, Pharells, Kanyes and even Cam-rons, the fashion trend is part of the character they sell in their overall package. Agree with it or not, people look to what they and their stylists put on their backs and feet almost as much as they look for what they say on the mic (which usually centers around what they have on their backs and feet). So if those guys are making big money and you’re working on a budget, you know if a c-note is spent on a shirt you WILL wear it, regardless. These aren’t exactly white tees (*stay tuned), you know? What they are though, centers on what I call the “spin cycle.” The spin cycle’s theory is nothing more than a summary of what your parents told you about – stories from the Bible, sampling James Brown and the McDonald’s McRib, “I grew up on that back in the day, it ain’t new, it’s just back.” This button-up trend is the same, nothing new at all. As a matter of fact, button-ups were around about ten years ago, they were just called party shirts then. Sure the designs were wilder, but not by that much. Just go to that one website, you know the one where they chronicle the cringe-worthy history of recent urban fashion (my favorite is a tie between the Gucci print and the jersey’s converted to matching prom outfits… priceless), a bunch of those things aren’t exactly simple designs. They’re bammafied just like party shirts were and will be used as ammo when kids see pictures of their parents in ten years. Where this “button-up” trend gets complicated though is when you mix in people who have been wearing these shirts to work for years and are now being lumped in with the Jay come-lately’s. Truth be told, many of these shirts can be found at your local department/upscale stores sitting on the same racks they and their poplin brethren have been sitting on forever. The popularity has just skyrocketed in the past year or so because “grown up” is in. I don’t even understand how you can get your “grown up”-on while blowing a month’s worth of grocery money on an overpriced shirt, then follow that up with the predictable splurge on the finest bottle of champagne at the club. I’m no hater, but if you’re taking Ramen noodles to work for the next two weeks because of you part-time pimptacular dressing complex. That’s not grown up to me. In fact, it’s quite juvenile. Ya Understand? Hopefully you will. Theo eventually did. |
FIYA NBA Ranks: #9 |
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